Chief Justice of India’s promise to make filing appeals in Supreme Court ‘paperless’, will remain a promise

Source:- economictimes.indiatimes.com

NEW DELHI: Chief Justice of India J S Khehar’s promise a month and a half ago to make filing of appeals in the Supreme Court “paperless“ from July 3, when the court reopens after the summer break, will remain a promise.

On May 10, the CJI, in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Vigyan Bhavan, said advocates would be required to file only a few pages detailing the grounds of appeal against a high court judgment or order and the SC registry would pick up records of the case digitally from the HC.

CJI Khehar had said, “Only grounds of appeal need to be filed in the SC. It will save tonnes of paper used every year in filing of appeals and greatly help the environment. The system will automatically through SMS and e-mail inform the litigant the court fee to be paid, the date of hearing and defects if any needing rectification. This will infuse transparency in listing of cases for hearing. We will gradually extend digitisation through Integrated Court Management Information System (ICMIS) to the district courts level.“

Justice Dipak Misra, who will become CJI in the last week of August, had said “posterity will remember and history will record“ the SC’s decision to go paperless by massive infusion of information technology in the working of courts. “On reopening of the Supreme Court after summer vacation, litigants will feel the digital empowerment,“ he had said.

The promises will remain on paper as the SC registry will not be able to digitally pick up case records from HCs, which are far from getting their case records digitised.

Without the entire case records of the HCs getting digitised and without a database link between the SC and HCs, it will not be possible for the SC to digitally draw case records from HCs to supplement the grounds of appeal filed in the SC. This is the view of most of judges TOI talked to about the SC’s preparedness to meet the promise of going paperless.

Digitisation of case records of the SC, which runs into a massive three crore pages, is expected to be complete by next year. It was started during the tenure of Justice H L Dattu, who had entrusted the task to Justice Madan B Lokur as head of the E-Committee. The task is enormous, given court records occupy many big rooms in the space starved SC, and has already taken more than two years. Digitisation of records in the SC has resulted in emptying of files from two big rooms, which have been converted into a swanky advocates’ lounge.

“If this is the time taken by the SC, which has more resources, then one can imagine the time that will be taken by HCs to digitise their even more voluminous records,“ a judge said. Many said thrusting digitisation on judges, who are at the fag end of their careers and who have handled physical files all their lives, might actually slow their pace of work given their unfamiliarity in reading files on a computer.

“Will advocates too use computers to argue their cases? If advocates continue to argue a case with the help of a paper-book appeal, why force digitisation on judges?“ asked another judge.